Sevilla D29: Look familiar?

For any of you who are GOT fans, that setting might look familiar :)  It's the amphitheater featured in season 7 of GOT when the White Walkers are being revealed to Cersei (see extra for a pic from that episode).

Well, today, I got to see the location where this was filmed. It's called Itálica and it has just reopened after the GOT crew finished filming scenes for the final season (in great mystery: no-one who lives there knowns anything about the plot). Btw, that amphitheater distinguishes itself for being the first ever built in an oval shape and the fourth largest in the world.

Anyhow, GOT aside, this is a pretty cool place. Itálica was the first roman city founded in then Hispania in 206 AC and home to about 8,000 people. It occupies 52 ha just 15mns outside of Sevilla and was discovered by farmers in the late 1800 after it had been abandoned and grown over for many centuries. I can just imagine the farmers cursing over all the 'stones' they had to plow over...  

The amphitheater as well as the foundations of a number of buildings and some mosaic floor covers have been excavated but a large portion of the city remains buried. Additional work is awaiting recognition as a UNESCO site (and subsequent funding). The outline of the city (aka, its fortified wall) have been marked and GPR technology is being used to identify ruins that lie under the ground (only about 15cm deep, I'm told).

One of the buildings that will not be recoverable is the temple that overlooked the city: over the years, the locals built their cemetery right in the middle of what would have been the temple - unbeknownst to them, of course.